Category: Italy in the media

Up in the Umbrian Sky, high above Panicale. With AIRiccardo

Counting the days till our July trip to Umbria and then daughter Wiley’s graduation from college in London. We are hoping she will be able to spend some more time studying in Italy now. Her Italian got crazy good with a few weeks of lessons in September and I think she wants to keep that momentum going.

One of our foreign correspondents, Harry from Steamboat Springs, saw these fine photos at our friend Riccardo Ripanti’s house and alerted us to them. Riccardo is a retired pilot and is back up in the air these days. He took these pictures and was nice enough to say we could share them with everyone. Enjoy! Thank you Riccardo!

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Counting the days till our July trip to Umbria and then daughter Wiley’s graduation from college in London. We are hoping she will be able to spend some more time studying in Italy now. Her Italian got crazy good with a few weeks of lessons in September and I think she wants to keep that momentum going.

By the way, speaking of Italy and England, did anyone see the USA Today with the chart showing where in Europe international travelers really want to go? They asked people who planned to travel within the next two years for their top destinations and what do you know? Italy was the very top with 25 percent. We knew that one! Followed by England at 20 percent and then it faded off to France at 18, Germany and Ireland at 16.

But. On the other hand: There was another chart. They love feeding us the tiny bits of information we can handle in charts at USA Today, don’t they? Notice I am not quoting any learned documents. Limited attention span? The other chart showed “Most useful second languages in business”. Spanish (where was Spain on the first chart, huh?) was 61 percent. That percentage of respondents thought Spanish was a most useful second language for business. Then 16 percent felt like Chinese. Way down in the doesn’t matter category was Italian at a positively recreational 2 percent. It might wreck everything if the reality of too much annoying commerce got in the way of all our holiday fun!

25 PERCENT SOLUTION. YET ANOTHER SUMMER GETAWAY STATISTIC

I had barely put down the USA Today when Midge showed me the latest Travel+Leisure Readers’ Poll. Visitors to their web site were asked to pick a favorite summer vacation. 32% said a kind of generic “Quiet beach anywhere” duh. But next was a more focused “Biking through Tuscany” at 25 percent. Italy always makes the charts.

Until next time,

See you in Italy,

Stew

So what is the Italy – California Connection?

Spannocchia was written up in two full-color pages of the LA Times in the last year and their phone has been ringing off the hook ever since. So that begins to explain their attraction a bit. But what is the big hook that draws so many Californians to Italy?

We’re off to California in a week. Our pro-bono client Spannocchia is having a series of fun raisers on the west coast. Spannocchia is the fine big non profit estate outside Siena you may have noticed here on these blog pages.

If you are going to be in LA on Sunday, March 13th or San Francisco on Tuesday, March 15th and would like to go to a party all about Italy, check out the details in the full invitation here.

Spannocchia was written up in two full-color pages of the LA Times in the last year and their phone has been ringing off the hook ever since. So that begins to explain their attraction a bit. But what is the big hook that draws so many Californians to Italy? Weather’s the same isn’t it? And the food very Mediterranean, olive oil based, right? For us New Englanders a trip to Italy has obvious benefits, we want in out of the darn cold. And it is just a short-ish plane ride from one side of the pond to the other. California is twice as far away and yet so many nice Californians wash up on Tuscany and Umbria’s shores we have to be hyper curious.

We’ll let you know what we find out and report back.

Italian Food. It is now officially everyone’s Favorite Food

Kimberly Clark has a restaurant and hotel division and they commissioned a survey of 5,5000 people in the UK, Spain, France, Italy, Holland and Germany to find out about European food attitudes. 89 percent of Italians basically voted for mom’s home cooking. Italian’s favorite food is Italian.

We actually did know that too.

At some level we all knew that. But now it seems there are statistics to prove it. Kimberly Clark has a restaurant and hotel division and they commissioned a survey of 5,5000 people in the UK, Spain, France, Italy, Holland and Germany to find out about European food attitudes. 89 percent of Italians basically voted for mom’s home cooking. Italian’s favorite food is Italian.

We actually did know that too. Over the years we have tried to broaden various Italian friends’ culinary horizons. We’re over that now. Once tried to treat a gang of friends visiting from Cortona to a classic Mexican junk food feast here in Yarmouth and we got sad and confused “why, oh why, did you run over my puppy and try to feed it to me” looks the whole night.

But it turns out Italians aren´t the only Europeans who think Italian food is the best. 42 percent of everyone questioned said Italian food was their favorite. Then Chinese. Chinese? That was a European choice? Let me see that questionnaire. Was it a write in vote? Then came French food next in the pecking order. Poor Spaniards. It appears they like Spanish food just fine. But they seem to be the only ones. Brits and Germans travel in hordes to Spain but only one percent of the people from those two countries say Spanish food is their food of choice. Hey! I got a question over here. Why go where you can’t eat the food? Just do like right thinking folks do and go to Italy in the first place. More pasta anyone?

See you in Italy,

Stew